A New Concept: “Christian Wisdom”
A few weeks ago, I received an invitation to contribute to the funding of a well-known Parisian Catholic cultural institution. To encourage my contribution, the institution in question referred to the need to spread “Christian wisdom” to our world. The use of this expression is obviously not innocent: either it reflects the author’s conviction that the request for a donation will be well received if reference is made to “wisdom;” or the author is himself convinced of the existence of this “wisdom” and of its positive character. It may also be that these two motives are combined.
It hardly seems necessary to emphasize the extent to which this expression, even though used by a Catholic institution with, as we say, official standing in the world, is in dissonance with some of the most fundamental and ancient texts of Christianity—thus, among others, Saint Paul’s statement (First Letter to the Corinthians 1:22-25): “But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews indeed a stumblingblock, and unto the Gentiles foolishness.” This dissonance is so strong, so blinding, that the fact that an official Catholic institution can use such terminology without provoking a reaction says a lot about contemporary Catholicism and its reception in the West. “We” expect Catholicism, and Christianity in general, to be “wisdom,” and for a significant part of the cultural apparatus of Catholicism, it seems desirable that it should be so.
But to understand the extent of this distortion, we first need to take a closer look at the concept of “wisdom.” What is wisdom? Wisdom covers two realities. On the one hand, it can be understood as a serious, not superficial, knowledge of the world, in the sense that, in primitive societies for example, we speak of a “wise man,” i.e., one who, within the group, knows more than all the others about the world in general and, in particular, about what we call “truth” and “error.” On the other hand, wisdom can also be understood as a particular state of the soul, made up of appeasement and serenity, supposed to protect the soul from the anguish resulting from the collective and individual vicissitudes of existence.
The essence of wisdom lies primarily in the articulation between these two levels of reality. Truthful, i.e., accurate, knowledge of the world is supposed to bring serenity to the soul, and conversely, the serene soul knows how to question the world accurately. Which of these two movements is prior to the other? None, since they are, in terms of the essence of the concept of wisdom, analogous: knowledge brings that appeasement of the soul that men call “happiness,” and “happiness” enables us to judge justly, with the necessary distance from passions and prejudices, which protects us from emotions and bias.
Wisdom is therefore capital. Here, I call capital any supplement that is injected into what is commonly referred to in our society as the “subject” or “self.” The “self” is the minimal capital allotted to each individual at birth, based initially on a stock of rights that the individual is granted as soon as he or she enters this world. Subsequently, throughout its physical existence, the “self” will have the opportunity to increase its capital, which takes different forms: financial capital, of course, but also rights capital (the stock of rights one holds), cultural capital, symbolic capital (mastery of the rules and signs that enable one to progress in society), emotional capital. So, why is wisdom a capital? Wisdom is capital because it enhances the “self.” It enhances the self in two ways: firstly, by giving the self greater control over its environment; and secondly, by giving the self a sense of security.
Perhaps, then, we can better understand why the search for “wisdom” is so highly valued in our world, particularly among the ruling classes. In a society where the disappearance of ancient forms of solidarity—the family in particular—leaves the subject alone to face himself and the fierce competition with other subjects to assert his “self,” wisdom constitutes a form of capital that is very useful and fairly easy to mobilize, provided one refers to the services of a few specialized technicians, who provide the “self” with the method required to become “wise” or to have the impression and give the impression of being “wise,” which amounts to the same thing, in a world where only the appearance of things counts.
Consumption, the Ultimate Horizon of our Time
The tropism that attracts Christianity to the side of “wisdom” is not innocent. It is not the expression of naiveté or the use of fashionable terminology. In fact, it leads to the construction of an artifact of Christianity that can be reconciled with our world. What does this “conciliation” involve? It consists in reconciling Christianity with the basic metaphysical orientation of our societies, which postulates that the purpose of existence lies in self-aggrandizement. However, this last expression requires some explanation. In many of my writings, I have insisted on the decisive role of consumerism in the Western world. By the term “consumption” I mean not only institutional economic consumption, i.e., that which is formalized by a price for the acquisition of a good; but, more broadly, a general attitude which consists in grasping existence from the point of view of consumption, so that whatever our present occupation, it is always governed by the concern to consume. How does this preoccupation with consumption materialize? It presupposes an analysis, which over time has become a reflex, that determines the opportunities, from the point of view of the self, offered by any situation, in order to extract consumption, from an environment reduced to a system of objects of consumption, i.e., goods that can be exchanged for, possibly, an expenditure of capital.
Let us take a few examples. First of all, the educational institution—unlike past generations, I am not going to view the educational institution as a transcendent reality coming down from on high to dispense an absolute good called “knowledge,” which I am bound to respect because it has a monopoly on this absolute good. I see the educational institution as a distributor. This distributor produces an object called knowledge, which I have an interest in consuming for two reasons. Firstly, if the consumption of this good provokes a sensation of positive enjoyment induced by the possession of knowledge. Secondly, if the possession of this knowledge enables me to increase my capital and thus be able to consume more at a later date. Naturally, this choice of knowledge (everything in our world is now a question of choice) will have to be weighed against the investment required to acquire it, and in particular against the expenditure of this precious capital—the time I will have to devote to acquiring this knowledge. Because I am constantly measuring the relationship between the consumption I expect and the capital I will have to spend on it, I am entitled to demand that the educational institution constantly adjusts itself to make this relationship as favorable as possible from my point of view. I no longer unconditionally respect the educational institution as a dispenser of goods from on high; I am a customer of this institution, and a customer has rights formalized in a service contract.
Let us take another example—relationships. When it comes to love, I am not going to make a commitment or give love for free. In other words, I am not going to spend love without calculation, simply because I am in love. I am going to enter into an economic relationship with a partner from whom I expect, in return for the expenditure of time and attention I am going to devote to her, a return in three forms: physical enjoyment, affective enjoyment and an increase in my relational capital and social prestige, as a direct result of my relationship. Once again, as in the previous example, a “cost/benefit” ratio is determined, which is the very essence of economic calculation. This ratio is liable to change at any moment, and it is therefore legitimate that, at any time, I should be free to give up the relationship with my partner if the capital I have invested in it is now too high in relation to the consuming pleasure I derive from it. This simple calculation explains why, in this day and age, love is no longer a sacrament requiring perpetual, unconditional commitment, but a prosaic commercial contract that can be broken at any time. It may be objected that there are still moments of pure gratuity in our societies. In this respect, let us take a look at the festivities that keep young urbanites in particular busy. Parties are a privileged moment of unpredictability when, as the saying goes, “nothing is calculated.” But do not be fooled by appearances. The “party” is only the apparent form of gratuity. That is why it is so highly valued, because in a world so saturated with selfish calculation, it gives the illusion of joyful, unselfish spending, of rediscovered communion with others.
In practice, however, celebration is the opposite of gratuity. It is the domain of demands. Demanding in the expectation of what it should provide—pleasure, of course, but also encounters, which are not exclusively or even mainly romantic encounters but, more simply, exchanges enabling one to enrich one’s address book and thus enhance one’s relational network at a later date. The performance required is also demanding, and requires preparation and practice—you will have to “perform,” i.e., express the blend of brilliance and casualness summed up by the term “cool.”
Like a soccer match shared “with friends,” like travel and leisure in general, like anything that has the reputation of being “free,” partying is part of the experience. Experience is by no means an innocent act, a moment devoid of calculation. Quite the contrary, in fact. Experience is there to confer prestige, the prestige of the person who has done it all, known it all, and who knows how to valorize, directly or incidentally, in the bend of a sentence, the thousand and one dizzying sensations he has experienced, attesting to a successful existence insofar as it manifests a high-flying consumption that is not within the reach of the first-comer.
Generally speaking, in our societies, anything that presents itself as “free,” “disinterested” or “festive” is par excellence the place and moment where the forces of calculation and the preoccupation with consumption—sorry, “experiences”—are most strongly expressed, and where the relationship between invested capital and consumer enjoyment imposes its iron law. Such is the case, in particular, with the whole theme of “revolt,” “rebellion” and “transgression,” through which the formal contestation of the existing order is transmuted into a “game,” an “initiation,” conferring the exhilaration of believing oneself to be the master of the rules, while respecting the only rule that it is effectively forbidden to transgress: the profitability of the relationship between the capital invested, the enjoyment obtained from the “experience” first on the 4th move and the subsequent capital gain, when the positive image of the “transgressor,” the “rebel,” is enhanced within the system.
Make no mistake—it is all a sham, and it is precisely because it is all a sham that the economy of the system can be profitable. For the affluent urban youth whose favorite pastime it is, there has never been any question of “revolting” seriously, in other words, of provoking a revolt whose consequences could be damaging to the status of those who indulge in it. The “experience” is and must remain a game; in other words, a practice limited by rules and rituals. It is about consuming the “free,” the “transgression,” the “revolt,” and then taking advantage of this consumption to acquire an image, necessarily gratifying, which will later be used to seduce and conquer. In other words, a certain type of consumption also serves to build a symbolic capital that enables us to “brand” ourselves. What is “branding?” It is the ultimate possession of symbolic capital when, without doing anything, by “being what we are”—in other words, what others believe us to be—we are likely to arouse a desire—a desire to imitate, for example, which can be transmuted into a desire for a logo, a desire for style, a desire to touch, a desire to resemble.
We often believe that technology plays a decisive role in our consumption patterns. It is because of technological “breakthroughs,” particularly in communications technologies, that consumption in our world is so dynamic. But this is a very partial view of our economic logic, postulating that there are objective needs that new technologies will satisfy. In an economic world where most essential physical needs have long since been satisfied, needs are almost never “objective.” They are invented through psychological mechanisms that mobilize a certain number of impulses and emotions in the service of objects we do not “need” at all, but which we “desire” because we invest them with representations that have nothing to do with the object itself, but everything to do with our fantasies, our frustrations, our fears, our disgusts. Thus, at least as much as technology, the modern economy relies on the use of the symbol, the social sign, which has the added advantage of not requiring inordinate construction costs. Buying a sports jersey, wanting the same dress as Angelina Jolie and, more generally, wanting to be, if only for a brief moment, a sports star or Angelina Jolie—all these perfectly “subjective” psychological mechanisms (in appearance, of course) determine a sign economy that is just as profitable as the economy based on “classic” goods and services.
The Birth and Affirmation of a New Bourgeoisie
The predominance of consumerism, and within it, of the consumption of symbolic signs, has given rise to a radically new type of bourgeoisie. Historically, every bourgeoisie is founded on the principle of possession and the valorization of this principle, making possession the supreme value and legitimizing its domination. From this common matrix, however, history reveals several types of bourgeoisies. These types of bourgeoisies are differentiated by the dominant mode of capital ownership. The 19th-century bourgeoisie, governed by the ownership of financial capital, invented a model characterized by (at least apparent) restraint in its lifestyle, since any excessive expenditure of financial capital was deemed morally shocking and likely to directly threaten its status. Thus, this bourgeoisie lent credence to the idea that the superiority of the principle of possession underpinning its domination was justified by its “tasteful,” cultivated and “reasonable” use of capital. The superiority of the 19th-century bourgeoisie was thus derived, not directly from its possession of financial capital, but from its refined use of capital through, for example, the elegance of its social life, its concern for its lineage, its patronage of artists. Hence the a priori astonishing example of a social class founded on money, but whose official ethics favored values inherited from the fallen nobility and proscribed the “vulgar,” the “obscene” valorization of money as money.
After the Second World War, a new type of bourgeoisie emerged in Western countries. The traditional bourgeoisie, discredited by the crisis of the 1930s and then by the war, and partly ruined by inflation, was replaced by a new bourgeoisie based on the possession of useful technical knowledge. It was the reign of the expert, the engineer, whose capital is essentially cultural and who, as such, values technical and technocratic knowledge, and academic success, as justifications for his domination. Rather than the intelligent use of money, this new bourgeoisie favored “work,” “competence,” which authorized a less restricted, less restrained use of money. However, not every use of money is justified. It must, at least formally, respect “culture,” “knowledge,” “competitions” and the “great schools.” With the crisis of the 1970s, the talented bourgeoisie, without disappearing (any more than the financial bourgeoisie disappeared), began a process of decline. We then entered what I have called in several books “The Age of the Consumer.” The generalized consumption of the world became the strategic variable of the economy and society, without which profit disappears. Everyone has to consume, more and more and more often. But this preponderance of consumption poses formidable problems for the bourgeoisie. If consumption becomes a generalized obligation, how can we produce the capital that is constantly required to be fully consumed, and how can we reconstitute this capital almost immediately in order to spend it again, and so on?
To achieve this tour de force, it is first necessary to shape a bourgeois class that is convinced that, in everything and for everything, the consumption of the world must be its sole obsession. This means doing away with the ethics of the “restrained” use of money, the justification of domination by good taste in the use of capital, and the limitation of the reign of interest to the strictly economic sphere. It also calls for an end to the respect for knowledge and competence inherent in the talented bourgeoisie. On the contrary, absolutely everything must be consumable, i.e., captured by interest, at least implicitly quantified and exchangeable against remuneration. Basically, the bourgeois subject has to perceive the world exclusively in terms of the enjoyment he can expect from it, convinced that capital can be used to procure every conceivable enjoyment, and that any moral rule that purports to forbid the conversion of money into enjoyment is unbearable.
But this is only one aspect of the problem. We also need to constantly produce and reproduce the required capital, so that we can constantly consume it. This requires two types of skill. Firstly, the ability to mobilize the financial capital circulating all over the planet, and to manage this capital in such a way as to make it as productive as possible, financially speaking. This means producing sophisticated financial engineering capable of both attracting global capital and generating capital from a series of leverage effects that take an initial economic reality—real estate, for example—and duplicate an almost infinite number of times the financial paper that this economic reality theoretically serves to pledge.
The second skill involves shaping the world through consumption. This means, first and foremost, transforming everything into an object of desire, and in particular everything that costs little or nothing to produce: the immaterial, the fantasy, the sign. To achieve this, we need to configure the human psyche as a desiring machine, occupied solely with detecting objects of desire. But it also requires that things be systematically worked towards desire, so that they become not just objects, but objects of desire. Finally, the subject must be not only a desiring machine, but also an efficient producer of wealth. Yet, a priori, work is the opposite of consuming pleasure. It is on the side of constraint. It is true that, in absolute terms, we can be proud of work accomplished, whether collective or individual, proud of a selfless pride. But the consumer impulse abolishes any sense of gratuitous pride, any awareness of dignity. Thus, we have to find another way. This other path consists in dressing up work to make it an object of consumption like any other.
Making work an object of consumption like any other presupposes inventing an enjoyment in work. This is the science behind the work resource and management specialists who compete in ingenuity to make work fun, through the formal abolition of hierarchy, “inspiring” experiences, team building, etc. Of course, this transformation of work into a consumer product does not apply to everyone. Those at the bottom of the social ladder—factory workers, for example—have little sense of the fun of work. But for them, the hard internal discipline imposed by neo-liberalism is enough—by increasing competition everywhere, you have to be and remain constantly competitive to keep your job and avoid the hell of casualization and marginalization.
Priests and Zealots of Consumerism
The techniques required to ensure world domination through consumption thus amalgamate categories of specialists who, by aggregating, constitute an entirely new type of bourgeoisie whose characteristics are as follows: First and foremost, this new bourgeoisie is fanatically dedicated to consuming the world. It is so even, and especially, when it wants to give the illusion of not being so, by exalting the formally anti-consumerist values of “gratuitousness,” “rebellion” and transgression, especially “sexual” transgression, which in reality constitute superior forms of world consumption precisely because they are dressed up in the garb of apparent gratuitousness and selflessness. In all things, this bourgeoisie grasps the world through consumption, i.e., through the relationship between required capital and expected consumer enjoyment that I described above.
Precisely because it knows and recognizes only consumption, the new bourgeoisie distinguishes and orders society on the basis of the form of consumption specific to each social group—naively petty bourgeois for the Saturday crowd in provincial shopping malls, “vulgar” and “bling-bling” for those who have abundant financial means of consumption but make the mistake of bragging about it and showing it off. The new bourgeoisie easily accuses the other classes of being “slaves” to consumption, not because they themselves have been freed from this obsession—on the contrary—but simply because the other classes do not know how to consume: by pretending not to consume, i.e., by consuming things that do not look like objects of consumption.
The new bourgeoisie proclaims everywhere its love of gratuity, its contempt for the philistinism of the “real” bourgeoisie, its refusal of norms, its taste for singularity and what would once have been called its “artistic” character, but these emphatic proclamations do not go against interest. On the contrary, they express the full power of the interest that determines it in its entirety. From the point of view of the bourgeois ethos, this is where its superiority over the bourgeoisies of the past becomes apparent. Of course, interest is the horizon of every bourgeoisie. But past bourgeoisies were still handicapped in recognizing the omnipotence of interest by the aesthetic, moral and ideological scruples I mentioned earlier. The new bourgeoisie has no qualms about considering everything from the point of view of interest, since for them, there is only what is consumed, and nothing else. For them, interest is not a matter of choice or inclination, but a matter of nature.
Because it suffers no inhibition from interest, the new bourgeoisie is a hyper-bourgeoisie. It fully accomplishes the program for the capture of the world by interest, which was the original project of the bourgeoisie, but which remained a highly theoretical program, held back by a whole series of prohibitions. Having dismissed all these prohibitions, the new bourgeoisie is, as a result, a more efficient bourgeoisie than the types of bourgeoisies that preceded it. It is more efficient because it has no qualms about manipulating signs, turning them inside out to express the opposite of their actual meaning. It has no problem falsifying the real, because this falsification has, for it, no moral character—the real is never dissociated from its interest, and is there, in fact, only to be exploited for the benefit of its consumption of the world. This superior efficiency makes the new bourgeoisie a hyper-bourgeoisie, in other words, a model that has only been preceded by prototypes.
The new bourgeoisie’s ability to constantly manipulate and disguise signs, inherent in its ideology, also characterizes its true “added value” in our system, endowing it with a technical expertise perfectly suited to the economic model of consumption. This expertise, however, is very different from the technical competence characteristic of the talented post-war bourgeoisie. The talented bourgeoisie had acquired objective knowledge, taught in schools. They possessed cultural capital. The knowledge of the new bourgeoisie, however effective, is not objective. It is based on the mastery of social signs—those which, for example, make an object fashionable, or soon will be, on the ability to project a positive self-image and to understand what signs are required to manufacture a positive self-image, on the ability to manipulate so-called spontaneous moral emotions to one’s own advantage. We often speak of the ability to “sense trends.” This expression says it all. You have to “feel” what is nowhere taught, and yet what those who are able to feel know without ever having learned it.
Symbolic Capital and the Power of Signs
Naturally, this gift did not just fall from the sky. It comes from a confluence of training. Training within families that are not necessarily endowed with very high levels of economic capital, but where a certain combination of economic and cultural capital enables one to have an opinion on everything, and to express that opinion with confidence; training within the educational establishment and institutions in general, taking care not to harbor any feeling of reverence towards them, but rather to maintain an ironic distancing from them, so that they are used for their own worldly interests, never to cultivate disinterested knowledge; a rapid grasp of the concept of the network, and the ability to forge the relationships that “work well,” while giving up those that no longer serve any purpose; training within “civil society” for causes and associations that constitute a pledge of high personal morality and thus enable one to use to one’s exclusive advantage the highly formidable weapon of “morality,” since one is, by essence, “moral;” finally, training in schools and institutes reserved for this new bourgeoisie where one learns nothing serious except the essentials—the use and manipulation of social signs, the fiercely held belief that one knows better than others on all subjects not because one technically “knows” but because one knows in advance what one needs to know, i.e., the direction to give to one’s discourse, and that one cultivates the values that are really useful in our world, narcissism and egocentrism, without false modesty or humility.
This web of complex, multiple formations explains why the new bourgeoisie “breaks codes,” which is in keeping with its essence and function. The terms “right” and “left” do not define it. It comes together under the banner of “progressivism,” but this vague progressivism does not have the same meaning according to the sub-groups that make it up—for some, it is all about making exchanges as fluid as possible, and in particular that singular commodity, both the most “objective” and the most “fantastical” of all, which we call “money;” for others, it is all about “deconstructing” “norms,” the family norm in particular, because, from the point of view of the new bourgeoisie, the abolition of norms is the condition of what it calls “freedom”, i.e., the ability to consume the world in its entirety.
This diversity can also be observed in terms of capital ownership. A fraction of the new bourgeoisie holds substantial financial capital, which is more the result of very high-income flows than of inherited family capital; such is the case, for example, of the portfolio manager or the tax lawyer. But financial capital can also be negligible, offset by a high level of “pseudo-cultural” capital. I say “pseudo-cultural” because, whatever its holders may say, it is less a question of objective knowledge than of learning a rhetoric, based in particular on concepts from the human sciences, enabling one to construct a pseudo-critical discourse, intellectual grids that can be recycled for just about any event or situation. From this point of view, a sociology lecturer, a frenzied deconstructor, or a journalist for an alternative media, obviously belong to the new bourgeoisie, despite their low direct monetary income. Let us not forget that capital, and cultural capital in particular, is transmutable. Not necessarily in terms of hard cash, but in terms of power and influence, in the form, for example, of articles in “hype” weeklies or presentations at relevant conferences.
Given their diversity, the sub-groups that make up the new bourgeoisie have little sense of belonging to the same social class. Quite often, they frankly detest each other and believe themselves to be driven by antagonistic ideologies, such as “liberals” on the one hand and “wokeists” on the other. But these internal conflicts are nothing new. Already in the 19th century, the bourgeoisie was torn between holders of landed capital and holders of financial capital, between the Catholic bourgeoisie and the radical bourgeoisie. Similarly, in the days of the talented bourgeoisie, engineers and technocrats competed for power.
In fact, beyond their internal conflicts, the sub-groups of the new bourgeoisie are united by interest—both are characterized by the predominance, over and above their relative portfolios of financial capital and cultural capital, of perfect mastery of symbolic capital, and therefore by stubborn economic, political and ideological action to ensure that Western societies conform ever more closely to the domination of this type of capital. There is therefore a substantial link between the “age of the consumer” and the power of the new bourgeoisie, so that the destiny of the one and the destiny of the other are identical. That is why any serious, coherent challenge to the reign of consumerism instantly unites the new bourgeoisie in the resolute, and if necessary, violent defense of this reign. In our time, this contestation takes two forms: on the one hand, a protest from the past, in the name of the values of yesteryear, of the pre-consumerist era, and of traditional religiosity, which the new bourgeoisie continually strives to discredit with the label “reactionary” (a meaningless label, since there is never any “progress” per se, and therefore no “reaction” per se); on the other hand, a nihilistic protest from the middle and working classes, inescapably driven back to simple jobs of execution, shattered by the generalized deregulation of the world and the disappearance of ancient solidarities, which we call, for want of a more precise term, “populism.”
The new bourgeoisie devotes part of its energy to building dikes—security dikes, but also, and above all, ideological dikes—against this double challenge. The construction of these dikes determines a class dictatorship, forcing political power, whatever its formal label, and sometimes against its personal convictions, to defend the interests of the new bourgeoisie and, in defending these interests, to extend indefinitely, and also to intensify, the reign of consumerism, both in society and in each of our individual lives, through the despotic affirmation of the consumer’s “I,” the reduction of the world to a sum of consumable objects, the generalization of competition, the discrediting and derision of anything that might once have been considered “sacred,” the commercialization of bodies, the reduction of human relationships to “commercial services” and so on.
A “Wisdom for our Time”
There’s one area in which the hyper-bourgeoisie has made its mark: our world’s relationship with time. A society’s relationship with time is never neutral; indeed, it is the least neutral, the most significant, because time is the channel that connects us to the highest truths. To put it simply, the new bourgeoisie perceives time as a due, which has no choice but to bring about a permanent increase in the subject. This increase results from the accumulation of capital, in its various forms; it also results from the accumulation of worldly consumption, in the form of ever more pleasurable experiences, of ever more possessive possession of things. Time has no choice but to be other. It has to be a permanent growth of the subject, and if it deviates from this requirement, for example through experiences radically opposed to jouissance, through suffering for example, or even simply through the disinterested contemplation of the world, there is scandal. What is a scandal? It is that which is unnatural. The nature of time, its profound essence, is to be profitable for the new bourgeoisie—and for it alone—and this profitability is not the result of a sophisticated economic calculation in the manner of the capitalists of old, reintroducing duration in the form, for example, of a temporary deprivation that would later induce a positive return. Time must be profitable, here and now, and all the time.
Expressed in philosophical terms, this demand for the profitability of time means that there is no room, in the unfolding of time, for negativity—in other words, suffering, lack, absence, waiting and, more broadly, anything that hurts desire or prohibits its realization. In the Hegelian dialectic, the time of negativity is a necessary moment for history. It is because consciousness, whether individual or collective, passes through the moment of negativity, i.e., of loss, that it can rise, through awareness of the loss and its profound meaning, and the search for an overcoming. This removal of negativity, in the representation of time specific to the new bourgeoisie, is obviously not anecdotal: the time of this bourgeoisie is not the time of history, i.e., of destiny. It is an immobile time that consists in the repetition of the mechanism of capital reconstitution and consumption; in other words, of the new bourgeoisie’s exploitation of the world. This is the blissful “end of history” that the Western ruling classes imagine for themselves—a time when nothing significant need or can happen, and above all nothing seriously negative; a time when accumulating for the sake of consuming, consuming for the sake of accumulating, is the only occupation—and an occupation doomed to perpetuate itself indefinitely; for there is nothing beyond this double movement, just as there is nothing beyond the domination of the new bourgeoisie.
Within this framework, and whether we are talking about the most material things or what are still presented to us as “productions of the mind,” nothing must ever fuel a process of negativity. Everything must be configured to be useful, even and above all what is formally presented as “transgression,” “critique,” “rebellion,” “marginality,” “denunciation,” “indignation,” “morality, “art”—usefulness here means the ability to be consumed and/or to serve the reconstitution of capital.
It is in this perspective that the so-called “Christian wisdom” naturally fits in, as does all worldly Christianity, which, because of its docility, lends itself perfectly to whatever you want to make of it: an instrument of appeasement for vaguely worried ruling classes, a moral decoration attesting to the morality of the wearer, and so on. Christianity thus becomes both an object of consumption and an instrument of power in the service of the subject, like everything else and with no more interest than anything else. Such Christianity teaches us to be “wise,” “moderate,” “humane,” “enlightened.” In other words, it teaches us to conform and to recognize in the domination of the new bourgeoisie and its values the blessed end of history.
Worldly “Wisdom,” Christian “Folly”
But why such a failure? How did worldly Christianity come to be, in essence, the opposite of the spirit of Christianity—an element of comfort, an object of bourgeois decor. It is so because it wanted to be wise. Wisdom is, as I said earlier, a capital. A capital presupposes, firstly, a subject (individual or collective), and, secondly, a wealth that is measured, with a direction that is the growth of the subject’s wealth. It is not just, or even primarily, about material wealth. Wisdom is, as I said, supported by knowledge and serenity, thus increasing the capital of well-being and good reputation of the subject who cultivates it.
But Christianity, in spirit, is anything but wisdom. It is madness, according to the world. Why is it madness? Firstly, because the direction it takes is in no way to increase the subject’s wealth. On the contrary, the direction it pursues is the resolute and continuous impoverishment of the subject, so that the latter becomes nothing more than an opening, a gap, that only God can fill. Symmetrically, by using the term “impoverishment” after “enrichment,” I am aiming beyond material impoverishment. I am referring to metaphysical impoverishment. How can impoverishment be metaphysical? Insofar as it consists in renouncing everything I thought was “me.” This is true, first of all, of any identity, individual or collective, even when it formally calls itself “Christian.” It is also true of everything that is spontaneously attributed to me, everything that I attribute to myself as irreducible characteristics of my subjectivity—my own qualities, my personality, my so-called spontaneous movements of the heart, my “authenticity,” my “naturalness.”
Our age is convinced that the subject, because it is the subject, cannot lie. In other words, everything that is supposed to “come from within” is sacralized, invested, ipso facto, with a truthful, authentic character and, because of this authenticity, recognized as legitimate in principle. It is enough to say, “I am who I am” for everyone to bow down. Christianity is radically opposed to this legitimization of the subject. This is because Christianity knows that, as Scripture says, man’s heart is “complicated and sick” and that, in this complicated and sick heart, impulses and representations are born which have nothing innocent or spontaneous about them, but which, teleguided from the outside or the inside, aim to build a “subject” that gives the soul the illusion of power and thus the temptation to consider itself as the center of the Universe. The subject always constructs itself, consciously or unconsciously, as a substitute for God. This is why, in contrast, the soul’s effort is to strip itself bare, to rid itself of all impulses and representations, so as to be what it truly is—a nothingness in search of God.
It is only when it is in such a state, when it has given up the idea of being a subject, when it is reduced to almost nothing, that the soul hears God’s call and lets Him draw near to it; sometimes to the point where soul and God become one. Christianity is madness, because whereas wisdom teaches man to find himself and to possess himself fully, in order to possess the world, Christianity teaches him to renounce himself, to lose himself, in order, perhaps, to find. Find what? Certainly not oneself, but an absolute loss, a disappropriation of oneself, such that it enables us to encounter the Universe and the One who made it.
Let us take a closer look. This Christian way of the soul is also an awareness of time. For the dominant ideology of our world, as we have seen, time is the ultimate instrument of exploitation, while itself being an intense object of exploitation. The moment has value only through the process of self-aggrandizement it enables, and the rational, systematic exploitation of time must enable us to “gain time again and again,” i.e., to increase our capital of available time and make this capital infinitely and indefinitely productive. The mastery of time is, in our time, the matrix and prototype of all the devices of control and profitability through which man transforms the entire universe into material in the service of his will to enjoy and his will to power.
From One Temporality to Another
Christianity’s relationship with time is quite different. This relationship to time is first and foremost one of disengagement. To be Christian is to accept that time does not belong to us; in other words, that we cannot control it to make it a mere generator of enjoyment. But it is not just accepting that time does not belong to us; it is also, and above all, wishing, wanting, that time does not belong to us; for time belongs to God. Of course, we believe in the final redemption of the universe. But until then, we have no promise, no guarantee of protection from suffering, evil, lack—and above all, no individual guarantee. We must therefore receive time without pretending to dictate anything to it. To “receive” time means to consent with a selfless heart to all that time brings with it—including “happiness” or “unhappiness.” This selfless consent is called humility. We are not truly Christian if we do not receive time with the humility of “Fiat voluntas tua,” if humility in the reception of time does not deepen within us that “desubjectivization” I mentioned earlier, that inner emptiness resulting from the defusing of all so-called personal impulses and representations, of all illusions of identity, whether individual or collective.
But time is not just about letting go. It is also consent to history. The dominant bourgeoisie is convinced that it has imposed an end to history, in the form of a permanent repetition of the consumption of the world which, by abolishing negativity, makes it impossible to go beyond this repetition. The serious Christian knows that this so-called “end of history” is nothing but an illusion. Negativity remains in our world. Those at the center of the world no longer perceive it, because they believe that everyone else, like them, shares in the supposedly joyous celebration of consumerism (including its formally gratuitous avatars, such as parties and, to use Guy Debord’s phrase, various spectacles). However, if we take a closer look at the margins of our system—and the term “margins” applies both socially and geographically—it is easy to see that the utopia of consumption for all just does not work. For it is the essence of consumption to generate frustration as well as enjoyment. Any good consumed is inferior, in terms of enjoyment procured, to the initial expectation. This, incidentally, is why the world’s consumption process is constantly intensifying. Each time we consume something, we are disappointed by the almost infinite and lasting pleasure we expected to derive from it. Hence the need to plunge ever faster into the consumption of a new commodity. Of course, not everyone is equal in this hysterical race. As I explained above, the members of the new bourgeoisie have the resources, particularly the symbolic ones, that enable them to renew their capital sufficiently to continue the race. The others are exhausted and sink into a neurotic relationship with consumption, made up of obsessive frustration, envy and self-loathing. There is thus a modern social unhappiness that bears no resemblance to the social unhappiness of yesteryear, based on material misery. Today, unhappiness stems from the shame of not being able to overconsume.
During the happy years of consumerism (roughly the last thirty years of the last century and the first decade of the present century), this unhappiness was, if not marginal, at least relegated and stifled. The extension of the realm of frustration to the middle classes, coupled with the distancing of other geopolitical areas from the Western “model,” makes this relegation impossible. This explains why recent times, with their succession of crises, can be seen as the age of the return of negativity after a period of false euphoria.
Christians should not be afraid of the negativity to come, even if it is certain, from a human point of view, that it will be hard to bear. But this return of negativity is the condition for the resumption of history; and history, seen from the point of view of theology and metaphysics, is nothing other than the process of reconciliation between humanity and God. Thus, a Christian must not only consent to negativity—he must also want it because, if he is coherent, he believes in a process of salvation through history. Not in history, but through history, for if history has an end, that end is transcendent, which is why reason is incapable of grasping it. For this, we need to mobilize spiritual forces other than reason, prophetic forces.
It may seem easy to want negativity when you are comfortably nestled in your armchair. But it is a different matter to live it, on both a personal and a collective level. For negativity is not a path strewn with roses; and the least we can say is that the history of the Church, over the last twenty centuries, to take a telling example, has not been pure, straight and devoid of suffering, failures and wounds to the sides. What is true for the Church is obviously true for each of us, and for the history of human communities in general. Negativity is not a concept; it is a trial in which man confronts the powers of the night without ever knowing whether he will emerge victorious from the battle. Evil, suffering and death surge through the world, through each of us within the world, and we must ride out this surge. We have to want the tragedy of destiny, because salvation comes through that tragedy.
Ever since Nietzsche’s criticisms, Western Christianity has lived with the fear of appearing dolorous. Thus, it does everything in its power to ward off the shadow of negativity. In so doing, the very economy of Christianity is destabilized. For, through negativity, the metaphysical drama at the heart of Christian revelation is expressed. Fall, atonement, redemption—this sequence, without which nothing Christian is comprehensible, presupposes that man must redeem himself. Negativity, insofar as it is willed—in other words, insofar as man humbly submits to the test—is the condition of redemption.
In Praise of the Cross
We now enter the absolute repressed dimension of modern theology—the essentially sacrificial dimension of Christianity. I say “repressed” because this sacrificial dimension is the exact opposite of the mentality currently dominant in the West, and is therefore radically erased by those who dream of a “reconciliation” with the times, without realizing that to erase sacrifice from the economy of Christianity is, de facto, to break with the spirit in the vain hope of saving the letter. “Sacrifice” has a very special name in Christianity. It is called “the Cross.” Passing through the Cross means not only renouncing all controlled profitability of time, but surrendering to God and submitting to negativity, because this submission is the condition of salvation—one’s own and, if we believe in the reversibility of merits, that of the entire universe, to which we are contributing.
The choice is between “Cross” or “wisdom.” Cross—self-sacrifice which, according to the standards of the dominant ideology, is nothing other than sheer “madness,” a shameful and repugnant waste of capital. Wisdom—the worldly logic of calculation and accumulation, obsessive control of the world and the greedy quest for absolute power over things. There is no middle way.
There is a passage in the Gospel that I have always found particularly poignant. It is the one where, after hinting at His coming sacrifice, Christ is abandoned by almost all His disciples, who find His words mysterious, bordering on heresy and psychosis. Jesus then turns to His apostles, to His beloved ones, and we can only imagine the sadness, and perhaps anguish, that presides over His question: “Will you also go away? Peter answers this question with the following phrase: “Lord, to whom shall we go? thou hast the words of eternal life.” Such is our faith.
Featured: Adoration of the Holy Cross, by Corrado Giaquinto; painted ca. 1740-1742.
